Paul Farmer Quotations

You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.

The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.

Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

I can't think of a better model for Haiti rebuilding than Rwanda.

I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.

What the American public thinks is very important to the future of global health. Many people are moved by the idea that there is unnecessary suffering in the world, and we could do a lot to stop it. We have the technologies necessary to stop most of the suffering.

For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

But as for activism, my parents did what they could, given the constraints, but were never involved in the causes I think of when I think of activists.

You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.

We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.

If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it's usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housing, or just bad housing.

I mean, everybody should have access to medical care. And, you know, it shouldn't be such a big deal.

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.

In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.

Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.

I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.

So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.

Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.

I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.

I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

If you look just at the decades after 1934, you know it's hard to point to really inspired and positive support from outside of Haiti, to Haiti, and much easier to point to either small-minded or downright mean-spirited policies.

I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.

I don't know much about climate change. But I'm pretty sure we better figure out what to do to lessen its impact - at least its health impact - and that's not going to happen unless you have a lot of young talent interested in these topics.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

I've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.

One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.

The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.

I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.

Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.

I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.

At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.

Shuttling back and forth between what is possible and what is likely to occur is instructive and a lot of what shapes our sentiment.

I am grateful for the chance to turn this into a movement. I am inspired to be part of a growing movement to eliminate poverty.

It is one of our more stable cities in terms of a population that has stayed, ... It's not a city where people leave in large percentages or arrive in large percentages, except as tourists. So I think you're going to see a very strong impulse among the people there to rebuild.

We have opened a hospital that was abandoned since the genocide 10 years ago and put some hundreds of patients on anti-retroviral therapy, for example, in the middle of rural Africa. We have also, needless to say, focused on whatever it is that ails the people who are coming to this hospital and the clinic sites around. And, that is everything from distress during labor, to malaria, of course to other projects. We do not have any doubt that this project will be a great success.

Well, we've worked with our friends in Haiti to establish nothing short of a modern medical center in one of the poorest parts of that country.

The prestigious Hilton Humanitarian Prize is a terrific boost as we seek not only to provide direct medical services in seven countries, including our own, but also to bring countless supporters into a broad and global movement to promote basic rights for the poor. Winning the Hilton Prize is the greatest recognition yet received by Partners In Health, and we are proud, honored and grateful.

Well, I don't think that the role of the pharmaceutical industry is any different from that of other transnational corporations.

You look around the U.S., and the nature of the people who settled in New Orleans is such that you couldnt go to another part of the country and find that mixture. Thats one reason the ties are so strong.

Due to the groundbreaking work of PIH, the global community has moved from asking 'should' antiretroviral treatment be provided to people living with HIV/AIDS in the poorest countries to demanding to know 'when' it will happen and 'how' to do it most effectively.

Even die-hard fans of the market acknowledge that TB care should be free. Why? Because it's an airborne disease and treatment equals prevention.

The toxic soup is touching every square inch of the flooded areas,

The toxic soup, as it has been called, is touching every square inch of the flooded areas, ... That issue of the environmental cleanup is one that we have not typically faced with other disasters. It's not just the structural integrity of the buildings, but it's the whole issue of contamination: contamination of buildings, contamination of yards.

It would be great if people would acknowledge that the state of Haiti was because of the resources we took away.

The workplace is often the most stressful place a person finds themselves in, employees and managers need to keep an eye out for signs of deteriorating mental health in fellow colleagues.

This is the best thing that's ever happened to us,

It was apparent from the early 80s that in order to do something lasting and significant in Haiti we would need a springboard in the States.

At the same time, the fact the world's poor are calling upon us to help is a marker, in my view, of the limitless potential of human solidarity.

In terms of the big cities of this country, New Orleans is clearly one of the cities with the most unique character, ... What's happened goes well beyond the devastation of one city - it's a national tragedy.

The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money

In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity.

Haiti was founderd by a righteous revolution in 1804 and became the first black republic. It was the first country to break the chains of slavery, the first to force Emperor Napoleon to retreat, and the only to aid Simón Bolívar in his struggle to liberate the indigenous people and slaves of Latin America from their colonial oppressors.

I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.

Equity is the only acceptable goal

I'm not an austere person.

The model of the teaching hospital, which links research to teaching and service is what's missing in global health.

...In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work.

60% of workers surveyed said if their employer took action to support the mental wellbeing of all staff, they would feel more loyal, motivated, committed and be likely to recommend their workplace as a good place to work.

lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.

Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.

WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches

There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives

I can't sleep. There's always somebody not getting treatment. I can't stand that.

People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.

That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.

If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.

What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.

If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

The danger is that they build up a power base and turn everyone in the organization paranoid, everyone becomes afraid of everyone else and the work culture begins to reflect the personality of the leader,

And I can also show you that people from all walks of life agree that someone who is sick deserves, in principle, compassion and care.